“This sequel is too much like the original” statements drive me absolutely mad when I see them in reviews. It just doesn’t make sense, on so many levels.

First, we are talking about a sequel to a game, right? The only time a game gets a sequel to begin with is because the original did well enough to earn one. Bad games (as defined by sales) don’t get sequels, so you basically never have the situation of a ‘bad’ game getting a second title, that is just more of that badness. Successful games get sequels, so at the most basic level, ‘more of the same’ is more of a ‘good’ game (again, mostly defined by sales, not your personal definition of what a good game is). Now perhaps people who liked the original are tired of that formula, but the history of all sequels to anything (movies, books, tv) strongly suggests people do, in fact, enjoy more of the same thing they liked before.

Second, think of the opposite position here. Would more people enjoy sequels overall if they were radically different from the original? “Oh you liked this deep TBS title? Here is its fast-paced FPS ‘sequel’, enjoy!”. Remember when Fallout 3 came out, and people raged about the switch to first person, even though Fallout 3 was still basically the same Fallout game just from a different perspective (more of the same, from a different view)? Now imagine if instead of just the view switch, Fallout 3 also did away with the lore, questing, and strong focus on story, and then tossed forced multiplayer in (Hi Fallout76, good luck). Would you rather most sequels go that route, or the more traditional ‘more of the same’ route?

I bring this up because a lot of the reviews for State of Decay 2 complain about it being too similar to the first. One review in particular was also critical because now that the studio was owned by Microsoft, they expected the game to be more ‘AAA’. What does that even mean in this context? The original State of Decay was great because it was pretty open-ended, and somewhat of a sandbox survival game. Pouring more money into the game to make it more linear, to have more ‘AAA’ set-pieces wouldn’t have resulted in a better game, just something very different.

I’ll get to whether the game itself is good in a later post, but I’ll just say today that compared to Steam, the Microsoft store is an abomination in so, so many ways, so thank you Microsoft for making me endure that just to play your game.

I’m going to disagree. Unlike movies and books, games are based on “flow” and “fiero”, the sense of creative accomplishment and heightened functioning leading to triumph. But this means that games must continuously build on the sense of mastery established in previous rounds. Or change things up so that the player is challenged along a different axis.

I think the statement ““This sequel is too much like the original” really means that the sequel failed to challenge the player’s sense of mastery of the original, and thus never evoked flow/fiero in the player. The player has mastered the sequel before she even begins.

I’m going to disagree. Flow doesn’t necessarily need to involve creativity and is important for movies and books as well.

I think the statement “This sequel is too much like the original” really means different things every time it’s used, and your attempt to generalize based on your personal attachment to your own experience is doomed to fail.

It depends. A sequel needs to be true enough to the original to carry the audience forward. It must, by necessity, be something akin to the first or it isn’t actually a sequel.

But video games are not movies. The next Avengers movie doesn’t have to compete with any of the MCU running in the theaters at the same time. The Fast and the Furious XXII won’t need to worry about the previous 21 titles. It will be in the theater, on its own, and even if it delivers the same story with a few name changes and some slightly different car crashes, it will probably do about as well. (See Star Wars: The Force Awakens for replaying the same script and succeeding, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi for an example of moving too far from expectations.)

Meanwhile, the original State of Decay is available and probably runs just as well… maybe even better on newer machines… than it did when it launched. So State of Decay must, in its way, compete with the original in the same store front. (Unless Microsoft removed it.)

And when the original is sitting there right next to you all the time, you have to differentiate somehow. The new game has to offer something newer, better, different or why bother?

That said, complaining about a sequel being like the original still sounds pretty dumb.

As for the Microsoft store… I occasionally bitch about being locked into Steam with so many purchases and roll my eyes when indie devs claim they cannot survive unless they are allowed unimpeded access to Valve’s storefront… but then I look at what else is out there and I go buy something else on Steam.

SoD2 does what you would expect a sequel to do; it has better graphics, better sound, more ‘stuff’. It’s just that the core formula (fight zombies, get loot, build base, repeat) is very similar/the same.